Thanks for raising this, cb. It's brought to light some things that surprised me!
The first thing that surprised me was that
sideburn isn't allowed. I didn't think of it when I played Friday's puzzle, but if I
had thought of it, I would have been about 99% certain it would be allowed.
The fact is that the plural
sideburns is in our word list, but not the singular word. (Its presence in the list doesn't mean anything in practice, because it's the only nine-letter word using that set of letters, and it's not classed as common enough to be the seed word for a puzzle.)
Why do we have
sideburns and not
sideburn? That leads to the second thing that surprised me - many dictionaries list only the plural word, as if you can only speak about them as a pair. This doesn't seem to make any sense. It's not hard to think of situations where you might want to refer to just one of a man's side-whiskers. Alina Adams did in her 2009 novel
The Man from Oakdale: "He had ordinary brown hair, jug ears, chipmunk cheeks, and a smile that stretched from sideburn to sideburn." The author of the article "Gleam Like a Marine" in the magazine
Men's Health in 2000 also needed the singular word: "At West Point and Colorado Springs, the cadet sideburn regulations are identical." And there are plenty of other examples around.
A similar issue came up a while ago
concerning the word crudite, which wasn't listed in the dictionaries in its singular form.
So, I think the dictionaries that recognise only the plural are in error, and
sideburn definitely should be allowed in future.
Another thing that I don't think I knew is the history of the word, as noted by Alonzo Q: that the word originally was
burnside, after a
US general and politician whose greatest achievement, apparently, was to grow a spectacular set of such whiskers. The word seems to have morphed quite quickly - driven by folk etymology perhaps - into
sideburn(s), and also
sideboard(s).
There is a chapter about words that exist mainly in the plural - words like
mews and
trousers, that we have discussed many times in this forum - in a book called
Word Watching, by Julian Burnside. I don't have the book at hand, but I'm pretty sure the author never mentioned the example of
sideburns, despite its connection with his surname.
